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Why ‘The Rag?’

Dr. Not-So-Strangelove or:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love The Rag

You might think that this blog’s masthead – Isabella Darling’s The Rag – was casually created, with little reason behind it. My name was already a given, and how much critical mass is there toTheRag? Well, here’s the scoop.

As a tender girl-chick handfed the politics of the 1960’s and ’70’s, I learned that the power to name is the power to claim.

As a young woman working for social justice, the blows of kid-gloved, brass-knuckled operatives taught me that an opponent can be obliterated simply by appropriating their language and their symbols.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and pamphlets like it, were little more than pulp and promise vitalized by the printing press.

A steady flow of chapbooks and leaflets ignited enlightened notions of reason, free will, individual liberty, and the natural rights of man.

Nearly 250 years later, the technology may have changed, but the flame remains the same.

My name is Isabella

I am no Thomas Paine and I never could have been a Founding Father.

At the time of the American Revolution, my predecessors were tending rags of another sort.

Prescribed duty comprised their material reality, under the rubric of “natural law.”

Natural law, which bestowed expanded rights upon men because they were specially created by God,contracted the rights of women – because they were specially created by God.

Instead of conferring privilege – as ability did in other instances – the ability to bear children exacted restriction.

The capacity to bear children became an imperative to do so. Capacity pointed to design, design pointed to purpose, and purpose was proven by the capacity.

The circular logic of this argument did not trouble most 18th century rationalists, since its consequences were both personally and politically expedient for the men who formed it.

The trefoil, the non-trivial knot of royal privilege. Its perfection does not bear scrutiny. To untie it, one must cut it.

Instead, the seamless, self-contained nature of the argument was hailed as testament to its perfection – proof that the arrangement was complete and divinely decreed.

And since the arguments that the revolutionaries were using to free themselves – the inalienable rights to which they laid claim – originated with God, questioning this arrangement would have been akin to taking a musket to one’s foot.

Such is the nature of pretzel logic.

Fast forward to today

The foul root of women’s diminished legal status is alive and well.

To the extent that women’s status has advanced, it has done so by working around the original, faulty premise of the 18th century “rationalists.”

But the original bad seed is now a poison tree in the garden of liberty, threatening to choke out the fundamental human freedoms that we as members of open society take as given.

It can be used against anyone, for any reason, at any time.

It is the underlying premise that privilege may claim the sovereign, exclusive, and absolute right to define meaning.

Words matter.™

Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

The revolutionaries argued that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness accrued to individuals by virtue of their God-given, human nature.

But they chose a baseline for and fashioned a construct of human nature – and therefore human rights – that was exclusively male (and white, and privileged.)

This resulted in the following logical fallacy: 1) Man is human. 2) Man has inherent human rights. 3) Woman is not man. 4) To the extent that woman is not man, woman does not have inherent human rights.

If woman was understood as fully human, women’s ‘differences’ would not be differences at all.

Instead, they would be (as they truly are) fundamental, essential components of human nature. From them, freedoms would flow, instead of constraints.

Through a different lens

No reasonable person disputes that pregnancy and childbirth are essential to the continuation of the human race.

No reasonable person would argue that men are defective, or that they deserve fewer rights than women, simply because they lack the ability to performthese vital functions.

And while women bear the significant physical and financial expense of pregnancy and childbirth, no one argues that women should be paid morethan men – or that they deserve greater resources than men – simply because they are able to perform the fundamental, indispensable functions that men need and are unable to perform.

Straight as an Arrow Shirt

Quite the opposite.

Instead, men’s inability to procreate is torqued and redefined as increased economic capacity (as if new human beings were not the sustaining force of the economic system) and men are rewarded for this inability, in both the public and private realms.

Round, richly productive & shirtless

Similarly, the following argument is not made, as it might logically be: 1)The primary, fundamental, human right is the right to possess one’s body. (You really don’t want to mess with this premise, folks – it is the legal foundation of every right you have.) 2)Pregnancy occurs within a woman’s body. 3)Therefore a pregnant woman has the right to complete and exclusive control over her pregnancy.

Aside from laws restricting and prohibiting abortion, current laws restrict women’s behavior during the course of pregnancy. What women eat, what drugs they take, the medical procedures they choose, even the work they do – all of these options are curtailed by unique legal limitations within the context of pregnancy.

Even if sexual assault ended this minute, women would still lack the fundamental human rights enjoyed by men.

Sugar & spice: belting it out.

The prescription of abstinence for women who wish to preserve the right to their own bodies is a de facto, prima facie assault upon that right.

Men may engage in sexual relations without compromising the right to their own bodies. Women may not. This is not biology. This is pernicious legal construct.

If corporeal rights properly existed in America, the putative fatherwho appeals to the court for control over a pregnancy that he facilitated would be sent home packing.

He would be told that if wants control over his seed and their fallout, he should keep them within his own corporeal limits.

Instead, he is granted a degree of property rights to a woman’s body simply by virtue of having tossed out a flag.

For a woman to retain the utmost of her inferior legal right – in order for a woman to possess her own body – she must not have sex.

And if a man wants possession of a woman’s body, he should have sex.

This is the logical outcome of an inherently flawed premise that cannot stand: A premise that ignores women’s nature when it comes to assigning freedom, and invokes it when it comes to establishing constraint.

New lenses and new frames

Orion’s Frames

This framing – this circumscription of human identity, this appropriation of language and meaning that results in the classic double bind – underpins every manufactured injustice.

It underlies the perversions of democratic principle that we see today.

Detention without charge, denial of due process, strip searches for traffic tickets (one need not actually run the red light to enjoy a governmental reaming; the allegation alone will suffice) – these present-day attacks upon the Constitution might have the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves, had they not spent so much of their energy tossing out flags.

Affronts to liberty, and the corrupt rationales that forge them, snare subject and object alike.

They substitute expediency for reason and force for legitimacy.

Anyone who will use them on your behalf will just as readily use them against you.

At worst, they are invoked to legitimize rape, torture, starvation, and genocide.